Che Guevara – The T-Shirt. Is there a sillier sight than a Westerner wearing a Che T-shirt? The face is everywhere: the beret, the star, the faraway gaze. A photograph taken in Havana in 1960, now printed on shirts, mugs and posters, manufactured in factories and sold for profit. The great enemy of capitalism became one of its best-selling brands. So let’s look at the man behind the T-shirt. Ernesto Guevara was born in Argentina in 1928, into a comfortable family, and trained as a doctor. Before the revolution, he toured South America on a motorcycle. Hollywood later made a film about it. The romance practically writes itself. In the Sierra Maestra, a peasant guide was suspected of informing on the rebels. Che shot him himself. In his diary, he recorded: "I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol." After the communist victory in Cuba in 1959, he was put in charge of La Cabaña, the fortress prison in Havana. Revolutionary tribunals. Firing squads at dawn. Dozens, possibly hundreds, were executed under his authority. At the United Nations in 1964, he said it plainly: "We have executed, we are executing and we will continue to execute." He founded Cuba's first forced-labour camp, for "re-education" – the forerunner of the camps where the regime later sent homosexuals, priests and dissidents. Then they gave him the economy: first the central bank, then the Ministry of Industry. He signed Cuban banknotes simply "Che." In 1962, Cuba introduced the ration book. It still has one. That same year, during the missile crisis, he said that if the Soviet missiles had stayed under Cuban control, they would have used them – against the heart of the United States, New York included. In his essay Socialism and Man in Cuba, he praised hatred as an element of revolutionary struggle, describing it as what turns a man into "an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine." In 1967, he was captured in Bolivia and executed. He was thirty-nine. Castro is remembered as a ruthless dictator. Che is remembered as a hero. The difference? Che didn’t live long enough to rule Cuba for decades. We will never know whether he would have been worse than Castro. Trotsky was the "good communist" who lost. Che is the other kind: the one who died young. Death froze him at the age of the poster. Next time you see the T-shirt, remember what it represents: the portrait of a man who helped build a revolutionary system of executions and forced labour, printed by capitalism and worn by useful idiots, the very people he would have sent to the camps.